Sun hires core JRuby devs

12Sep06

Apparently the Ruby (and one must assume, Rails) hype has not fallen on deaf ears over at Sun HQ. They’ve hired the core JRuby developers to work on JRuby:

The primary goal is to give JRuby the attention it really needs. The potential for Ruby on the JVM has not escaped notice at Sun, and so we’ll be focusing on making JRuby as complete, performant, and solid as possible. We’ll then proceed on to help build out broader tool support for Ruby, answering calls by many in the industry for a “better” or “smarter” Ruby development experience. I’m also making it a personal priority to continue growing the JRuby community, foster greater cooperation between the Java and Ruby worlds, and work toward a “whole-platform” Ruby-on-JVM strategy for Sun.

Apparently Tim Bray was one of the driving forces behind hiring these guys. Lots of interesting stuff in his post about the JRuby announcement, although one line in particular jumped out at me: “In particular, I’m concerned about the slow progress on the next-generation native Ruby engine and would like to help there too.” The cynic in me wonders if they’re hoping Rite will go down in flames while JRuby slowly overtakes Ruby 1.x in robustness and performance. It could definitely happen…